HAPPY MAYDAY!

It's Mayday, and we're celebrating International Worker's Day and the accomplishments of the labor movement--a good thing to celebrate in this season of layoffs, bankruptcies, and billion dollar bailouts. The economy looks shaky, but the weekend is here (thanks to unions) and today we're looking beyond our shores for some good music to kick it into high gear. The Cold War is over, they tell me, and since we're already trading with Vietnam and China (those commies drink a lot of Coca Cola) perhaps it's time to get off our high horse and recognize the people living on a tiny island just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Let's celebrate Mayday with some Cuban soul. Adelante!

In the 1940s, the Buena Vista Social Club was a members only club that regularly held dances in old Havana. A half century later, musician and musicologist Ry Cooder hurdled the blockade and traveled to Cuba to meet with the surviving musicians of the legendary club, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Rubén González and Eliades Ochoa. The result was a brilliant and popular album that brought international attention to Cuban music, and a worldwide tour. Enjoy the music and humanity of this fine documentary by Wim Wenders.

I dare you to not like this music!

RY COODER

Ry Cooder is an amazing guitar player. As a session man, Ry has played with everyone from Captain Beefheart to Taj Mahal, Randy Newman to Ali Farka Toure. He reassembled the Buena Vista Social Club and helped bring the talented Cubans to worldwide acclaim. Ry played guitar on "Let It Bleed" and "Sticky Fingers" with the Rolling Stones. (That crazy slide guitar on the bluesy "Memo from Turner" sung by Mick in the film "Performance" was all Ry) On top of that, he came up with some fantastic solo albums, such as "Bop Till You Drop," shown above. Blues, rock, soul, latin, African...you name, he's been there, done that.

The word on the street is that Ry is coming out with "I, Flathead," an album about offbeat Los Angeles in the 1950s. It's the third in a series of LA slices of life that includes "Chavez Ravine" and "My Name is Buddy."


The above clip is classic Ry Cooder, playing with The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces, an all-star lineup, from a film by Les Blank taped at The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, CA on March 25'th 1987.

Band:
Ry Cooder: guitar, vox
Jim Keltner: drums
Van Dyke Parks: keys
Jorge Calderon: bass
Flaco Jimenez: accordion
Miguel Cruiz: percussion
Steve Douglas: sax
George Bohannon: trombone

Singers:
Bobby King: tenor
Terry Evans: baritone
Arnold McCuller: tenor
Willie Green Jr: bass

THE AGE DEMANDED

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.

--Ernest Hemingway, 1922

CIGAR BOX ART

I love old cigar boxes -- and the old weird artwork that decorates them. The beautiful lettering, and rich lurid colors make me want to smoke a nice Cohiba or Montecristo -- and now that Castro has stepped down perhaps our fearless leaders will lift the longtime ban on Cuban cigars. (Damn, I promised myself I'd be civil. Oh, well.) Anyway, these are some of my cigar box favorites! Smoke 'em if you got 'em!

FIDEL CASTRO RESIGNS

After surviving invasions, assassination attempts, and embargoes, old age has forced Fidel Castro to announce his retirement. For nearly fifty years, the tiny island ninety miles off the coast of Florida has remained a socialist country, ever since a small band of rebels led by Castro overthrew the US-supported dictator, Fulgencia Battista, on New Years Day, 1959.


President Bush predictably called for "democracy," a word he doesn't seem to fully understand worldwide (since the US picks and chooses which dictators to support) and certainly doesn't understand in regard to Cuba, where the US controls Guantanamo military prison (see map); in "our" Cuba, prisoners wait years for secret "trials," experience torture at secret CIA "black sites," and systematically lose rights guaranteed by the Geneva Convention.

I'm just saying, if you live in a glass house...

Photograph: Castro and friend, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was killed by the Bolivian Rangers directed by the CIA in 1967.

CUBA LIBRE

Sorry, you aren't free to travel to Cuba.

US State Department prohibits Americans traveling to Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, because Cuba is not "free."

However, you are "free" to travel to China, Vietnam, El Salvador, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Go figure.

For extra credit, define "free."